A coalition of European Greens has urged US Green Party candidate Jill Stein to withdraw from next week’s elections and back Kamala Harris to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.

Green parties in 16 European countries, from Portugal to Ukraine, distanced themselves from their American counterparts in a statement on Friday and called on Stein to withdraw from the race.

“It is clear to us that Kamala Harris is the only candidate who can block Donald Trump and his anti-democratic, authoritarian policies from the White House,” they wrote.

The signatories include green parties from several countries in which they govern as part of coalitions, such as Germany, Ireland, Belgium and Spain. The parties said there was “no link” between the Greens in Europe and the US.

“The American Greens are no longer a member of the global organization of Green Parties,” they wrote. “In part, this divide was due to their relationship with parties with authoritarian leaders and serious policy differences on key issues, including Russia’s massive attack on Ukraine.”

The American electoral college system disadvantages small parties such as the Greens, which receive 1 to 2% of support in opinion polls. But their influence could still affect the overall outcome by chipping away at support for the two main parties in key battleground states.

As of October 30, polls put Harris at 47% and Trump at 46% – but analysis shows that even small shifts in voter behavior could decide who ends up in the White House.

In the US, the Green party is called ‘not serious’ by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Democratic congresswoman from New York. “All you do is show up once every four years to talk to people who are rightfully pissed, but you only show up there once every four years, you don’t mean it,” Ocasio-Cortez posted on Instagram last year . month. “To me it doesn’t read as authentic. It reads as predatory.”

The US Greens said the European Greens were repeating “intense partisan invective, smears, disinformation and Democratic Party talking points”. They criticized Democrats for increasing oil and gas production and providing military aid to Israel.

They also suggested that the American Greens were receiving support from people who did not want to vote for either of the two main candidates.

“European Greens can support whoever they want in a US election, but we invite them to communicate directly with us to understand our positions and participation in elections, and to support our demand for a national popular vote through ranked choice for the president. , which would eliminate the perceived spoiler factor.”

“The Democratic Party has ignored and rejected this demand, leading us to believe that Democrats would rather lose to Republicans like Trump than tolerate the presence of more than two parties in US elections.”

Trump has dismissed the climate crisis as a hoax and promised to cut spending on clean energy while unleashing a wave of oil and gas expansion.

During Trump’s last term in office, the US was the first country in the world to withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate agreement. UN Secretary-General António Guterres compared it in an interview with the Guardian on the sidelines of a biodiversity summit in Colombia this week faced the prospect of a second US departure from the treaty with losing a limb but surviving.

“We don’t want a paralyzed Paris agreement,” he said. “We want a real Paris agreement.”